Introduction: the use of corpora for language teaching and learning

Abstract

This paper aims at contextualizing and presenting the first volume of the journal Research in Corpus Linguistics and is, therefore, divided into two main parts. First of all, it provides an introduction to the field ofcorpus linguistics and its increasingly relevant role in language teaching and learning. Secondly, it briefly introduces and discusses the six articles of the volume. Stemming from oral presentations delivered at the 4th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC2012, Jaén, Spain), these articles have a number of features in common. They all make extensive use of corpora and at the same time deal with language teachingand language learning, the underlying assumption being that a genuine and mutually beneficial connection can be established between teaching and research. For this reason, each of them constitutes an illustrative sample of how different corpora can be exploited for different research purposes.